The Rhino rubbed a massive paw over his face, flicking droplets of salty sweat onto the dirt in front of him. Traffic crawled along the gravel road, raising a miasma of red dust that slightly dulled the fierce sunburst glinting off chrome and tinted windshields. He grinned at the plight of two black stretch Hummer limos trapped in the slow-moving snarl. Small flags hung limp from their aerials: the new red and gold ensign of the South American Federation. Newcomers in town and utterly clueless with it. He wondered what had brought them all the way here. It wasn’t as though Roberto’s operation lacked for resources. Sprawled across the territories of half-a-dozen former states, the Federation was ridiculously wealthy, at least in potential. It remained a prison camp, however, with the Colombian gangster-turned-dictator still smashing his fist down wherever he thought he detected the slightest opposition.

Although he knew it was foolish, even a little conceited, the Rhino faded away from the gutter and back into the crush of the crowd, not wanting to be seen by the occupants of the diplomatic convoy. They were probably just in town to negotiate with a few of the local mining companies, offering a generous cut of the profits if the Australians, or increasingly the South African companies who were moving here, would assist in restarting production at any one of the Federación’s hundreds of projects that had imploded during the general collapse. It was also possible that they were here to see about joining the Alliance – but he didn’t think the current member states would be game for that. Seattle still had enough clout, just barely, to block any membership bid.

The Rhino had witnessed part of the collapse first-hand, when Acapulco, the Mexican port on the southern fringe of the Wave, fell apart. And almost certainly alone among the masses of people swarming through Darwin, he’d played a small role in the rise of el Presidente por Vida, Roberto Morales. In those days – an age ago in less than five years – Roberto had been nothing but a small-time local hood, fortunate enough to score a sweet deal providing muscle to a couple of the more expensive resorts, such as the Fairmont. Fortunate because he had lucked into a crew run by one Miguel Pieraro, a man who had, in the Rhino’s opinion, probably shot dogs with more highly developed codes of honour than Morales.

The Rhino had no idea where Pieraro was now, of course, but he wished him and his family well. He knew they’d spent some time in the refugee camps outside Sydney when they’d got off Miss Julianne’s boat, and that they’d applied to move to America as part of President Kipper’s resettlement program. Roberto meanwhile was ensconced in his newly constructed Presidential Palace in Caracas.